Final Design Journal
It is finished!
What a relief. I have had such a great time going through this process. Most people don't enjoy doing work like this, but I really enjoy the challenge and reward that comes form a feeling of accomplishment. Over the past 9 months I have learned a few important messages. They are as follows in no particular order.
1- Don't fall in love with a particular design principle or piece of instruction.
What do I mean? It seemed that as I would design something I would think that it was the coolest or best way to teach something, but when evaluation time came it was just these principles or instructions that the students either did not like or were unable to follow. This was hard to watch happen, and hard to swallow when it came time to delete or completely change something I had so much invested in, but overall my ability to change to help the learner helped create a more fluid and comprehensible piece of instruction.
2- Don't spend an inordinate amount of time on the little things. Focus on the actual instruction more than the site design or " neat technology". I spent hour upon hour trying to design "cool" Flash animations to give a neat introduction to each unit. These are nice and cool, but the final group of learners did not even notice the actual content embedded into these animations. So in the end, they were noting besides nice moving pictures.
3- The ADDIE design model takes a lot of time at the beginning, but produces useful easy to implement content in the end. I could not believe how much time I spent analyzing the learner and the learning context. I seemed to being doing way too much front end work and felt as though I had nothing to show for it. This was true in a way, but so wrong when it really came down to it. This work helped me to design instruction right the first time and prevented most of the confusion that would have come at implementation and evaluation time. The instruction was designed solidly, learners were able to follow along and score well on the exams. This was the reward for the front end work.
4- I used to create crap. Before this program I had created a lot of online content for my science classes. Most of this was just taken exactly from what I had done in class, just posted to the web. The design process especially the implementation and evaluation steps have helped me learn that you really can't do this. Instruction has to be completely redesigned for distance delivery. The learners that I had help me along the way reinforced this time after time as they struggled to understand the content that I tried to adapt to the web. It did not take long to learn this lesson. Instruction had to be completely redesigned, not just adapted.
There were many more lessons learned, some small, some big. The ultimate lesson was one of self realization that good instruction takes time, a defined set of objectives, and lots of patience. As mentioned before I really enjoyed this process, each step lead to some frustration, but ultimately understanding and increased knowledge.
Thanks to all who helped me in learning these lessons, Kristen, Kelli , Daniel, Casey, Kelli, Emily, Jana, Kayla, Kelli O, and James. All were very helpful in their evaluation of this project.
A special thanks to Sandie for her guidance and patience. And finaly a huge thanks to my wife for her constant editing especially spelling and for her unbelievable patience with me through this process.
It is finished!
What a relief. I have had such a great time going through this process. Most people don't enjoy doing work like this, but I really enjoy the challenge and reward that comes form a feeling of accomplishment. Over the past 9 months I have learned a few important messages. They are as follows in no particular order.
1- Don't fall in love with a particular design principle or piece of instruction.
What do I mean? It seemed that as I would design something I would think that it was the coolest or best way to teach something, but when evaluation time came it was just these principles or instructions that the students either did not like or were unable to follow. This was hard to watch happen, and hard to swallow when it came time to delete or completely change something I had so much invested in, but overall my ability to change to help the learner helped create a more fluid and comprehensible piece of instruction.
2- Don't spend an inordinate amount of time on the little things. Focus on the actual instruction more than the site design or " neat technology". I spent hour upon hour trying to design "cool" Flash animations to give a neat introduction to each unit. These are nice and cool, but the final group of learners did not even notice the actual content embedded into these animations. So in the end, they were noting besides nice moving pictures.
3- The ADDIE design model takes a lot of time at the beginning, but produces useful easy to implement content in the end. I could not believe how much time I spent analyzing the learner and the learning context. I seemed to being doing way too much front end work and felt as though I had nothing to show for it. This was true in a way, but so wrong when it really came down to it. This work helped me to design instruction right the first time and prevented most of the confusion that would have come at implementation and evaluation time. The instruction was designed solidly, learners were able to follow along and score well on the exams. This was the reward for the front end work.
4- I used to create crap. Before this program I had created a lot of online content for my science classes. Most of this was just taken exactly from what I had done in class, just posted to the web. The design process especially the implementation and evaluation steps have helped me learn that you really can't do this. Instruction has to be completely redesigned for distance delivery. The learners that I had help me along the way reinforced this time after time as they struggled to understand the content that I tried to adapt to the web. It did not take long to learn this lesson. Instruction had to be completely redesigned, not just adapted.
There were many more lessons learned, some small, some big. The ultimate lesson was one of self realization that good instruction takes time, a defined set of objectives, and lots of patience. As mentioned before I really enjoyed this process, each step lead to some frustration, but ultimately understanding and increased knowledge.
Thanks to all who helped me in learning these lessons, Kristen, Kelli , Daniel, Casey, Kelli, Emily, Jana, Kayla, Kelli O, and James. All were very helpful in their evaluation of this project.
A special thanks to Sandie for her guidance and patience. And finaly a huge thanks to my wife for her constant editing especially spelling and for her unbelievable patience with me through this process.
It is finished!
posted by Mr. D at 11:34 AM
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